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How far in the future is the ban of psychotronic weapons?

In March 2012, Russia’s defense minister Anatoli Serdjukov said at a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin: “The development of weaponry based on new physics principles; direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, etc., is part of the state arms procurement program for 2011-2020.”

The world media reacted to his hinting about the open use of psychotronic weapons by publishing scientific experiments from the 1960s in which electromagnetic waves were used to transmit simple sounds into the human brain. However, most of them avoided saying that extensive scientific research has been carried out in this area throughout the world since then. Colombian newspaper El Espectador was only one of a few to publish an article covering the full scale of the achievements of this research. [Read the English version here ]

UK-based newspaper Daily Mail wrote that research in electromagnetic weapons had been secretly carried out in the United States and Russia since the 1950s and that “previous research has shown that low-frequency waves or beams can affect brain cells, alter psychological states and make it possible to transmit suggestions and commands directly into someone’s thought processes. High doses of microwaves can damage the functioning of internal organs, control behaviour or even drive victims to suicide.”

In 1975, neuropsychologist Don R. Justesen, director of Laboratories of Experimental Neuropsychology at Veterans Administration Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., unwittingly leaked national security information. He published an article in American Psychologist about the influence of microwaves on living creatures’ behavior. In the article, he quoted the results of an experiment described to him over a phone conversation by colleague Joseph C. Sharp, who was working on Pandora, a secret project of the U.S. Navy. Justesen wrote : “By radiating themselves with these “voice modulated’ microwaves, Sharp and Grove were readily able to hear, identify, and distinguish among the 9 words. The sounds heard were not unlike those emitted by persons with artificial larynxes.”

That this system was later brought to perfection is proved by the document which appeared on the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1997, where its Office of Research and Development presented the Department of Defense’s project, Communicating Via the Microwave Auditory Effect. The office offered the following description : “An innovative and revolutionary technology is described that offers a low-probability-of-intercept radiofrequency (RF) communications. The feasibility of the concept has been established using both a low intensity laboratory system and a high power RF transmitter. Numerous military applications exist in areas of search and rescue, security and special operations.”

In January 2007, the Washington Post wrote on the same subject: “In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent — records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear — the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.”

We can only stress again that the world media avoided publishing the full scale of the progress of this research. Dr. Robert Becker, who was nominated twice for a Nobel Prize for his share in the discovery of the effects of pulsed fields at the healing of broken bones, wrote in his book, titled Body Electric, about the 1974 experiment by J. F. Schapitz, released due to the Freedom of Information Act request. Schapitz stated: “In this investigation, it will be shown that the spoken word of hypnotist may also be conveyed by modulated electromagnetic energy directly into the subconscious parts of the human brain – i.e. without employing any technical devices for receiving or transcoding the messages and without the person exposed to such influence having a chance to control the information input consciously.” In one of the four experiments, subjects were given a 100-question test, ranging from easy questions to technical ones. Later, not knowing they were being irradiated, they would be subjected to information beams suggesting the answers to the questions they had left blank, amnesia for some of their correct answers, and memory falsification for other correct answers. After two weeks, they had to pass the test again (Dr. Robert Becker: Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of
Life, William Morrow and comp., New York, 1985, http://www.amazon.com/Body-Electric-Electromagnetism-Foundation-Life/dp/0688069711 ). The results of the second test were never published. It is rather evident that in those experiments the messages were sent into the human brain in ultrasound frequencies in which the human brain perceives but of which the subject is unaware. Becker, due to those publications and his refusal to support the building of the antennae for the communication with submarines in brain frequencies, lost financial support for his research, thereby putting an end to his scientific career.

Transmitting human speech into the human brain by means of electromagnetic waves is for researchers one of the most difficult tasks. It must be much easier to control human emotions that motivate human thinking, decision making and actions. People who claim to be victims of experiments with those devices complain, aside of hearing voices, of false feelings (including orgasms) and aches of internal organs, a condition physicians are unable to diagnose.

In November 2000, the Committee on Security of the Russian state Duma stated that capabilities enabling remote control of the human nervous system or the remote infliction of health impairment are available to many modern governments. It is evident that those technologies are used, in conflict with the Nuremberg code, for experiments on unwitting human subjects. In 2001, the newspaper of the U.S. Army wrote that Israel was experimenting with those weapons on Palestinians. Ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, while under siege at the Brazilian embassy in Honduras, complained that he had been subjected to an “electron bombardment with microwaves” which produces “headache and organic destabilization.” When asked by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman if he knew about this in the Honduran arsenal, he replied: “Yes, of course.”

The use of those weapons is reemerging in times of political crisis. According to Russian daily newspapers, during the failed putsch against Mikhail Gorbachov in 1991, General Kobets warned the defenders of the Russian White House that mind control technology could be used against them. After the putsch, the vice president of the League of Independent Scientists of the USSR, Victor Sedlecki, published a declaration in the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda where he stated: “As an expert and a legal entity I declare that mass production … of psychotronic biogenerators was launched in Kiev (this is indeed a very serious issue). I cannot assert for sure that that were exactly Kiev generators that were used during the putsch… However, the fact that they were used is obvious to me. What are psychotronic generators? It is an electronic equipment producing the effect of guided control in human organism. It especially affects the left and right hemisphere of the cortex. This is also the technology of the U.S. Project Zombie 5.“He further stated that due to the inexperience of the personnel who operated them, the attempt to use the generators failed (Komsomolskaya Pravda, August 27,1991, “Avtory programy Zombi obnaruzheny v Kieve”, http://web.iol.cz/mhzzrz/img/Authors_of_project_zombie.gif ).

Presently in the U.S., several hundred people are complaining of the remote manipulation of their nervous system and are preparing a class action lawsuit against the FBI, the Department of Defense and other agencies, requesting that they release files pertaining to their persons, detect the harmful radiations aimed at their bodies, and sources of the radiation. Also, over 2,000 people are complaining in Russia, over 200 in Europe, over 300 in Japan and several people in China and India. Russian politician Vladimir Lopatin, who was working on the Committee on Security of the Russian state Duma and who introduced a bill banning the use of those technologies, admitted in his book, titled Psychotronic Weapon and Security of Russia, that in Russia, experiments on unwitting citizens are carried out. “Compensation of damages and losses connected with social rehabilitation of persons suffering from destructive informational influence must be realized in legal trial,” he wrote .

It should be understood that most of those people pass through mental hospitals. Lopatin visited the U.S. in 1999 to meet with Richard Cheney. At that time he was described as the “leader of a new breed of Soviet dissidents.” Then, he disappeared from top ranks of Russian politicians.

Why has this research remained classified until now? There are two explanations: First, there is a secret arms race in progress in the world where the superpowers compete to gain decisive supremacy in this area, and, in this way, master the control of the whole world. Second, the governments keep those technologies in store in case they would not be able to control, by democratic means, the crises that may arise as a result of their poor decisions. In both cases, the era of democracy and human freedom will come to an end. According to the declaration of Serdjukov, there are, at the most, eight years left within which those weapons will officially become a part of the Russian military arsenal. For democracy, this would mean the beginning of the end.

In the past, Russians were not resolved to put those means to work. When the construction of the American system HAARP was launched, with the system supposedly being able to target large regions of the planet by vibrating the ionosphere in brain frequencies http://nova.stanford.edu/~vlf/publications/2007-13.pdf , Russia declared its willingness to ban mind control technologies. The Russian state Duma, and, consequently, the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Union of Independent States, addressed the United Nations, OBSE and the European Council with a proposal for an international convention banning the development and use of informational weapons. According to the Russian newspaper Segodnya in March 1998, the matter was discussed with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan and included on the agenda of the General Assembly of the U.N. It is most likely that the U.S. refused to negotiate this convention, and, in consequence, the ban of informational weapons was not discussed by the U.N. General Assembly. Even in the U.S., Congress approved a bill proposing the ban of mind control technologies http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?c107:chemtrails . But this was only for a very short period of time. The bill was then changed, and the ban of those technologies was left out of the Space Preservation Bill. Neither Congress nor the president made ever an effort to ban mind control weapons. The European Parliament reacted as well to the launch of the HAARP system construction, calling for a ban on the manipulation of human beings. The resolution was passed after the testimony of the Nick Begich, author of the book Angels Don’t Play this HAARP. His testimony convinced the European Parliament of the possible use of this system to manipulate the minds of whole populations. In the European Parliament’s STOA (Science and Technological Options Assessment) panel report, titled Crowd Control Technologies, the European Parliament calls “for an international convention and global ban on all research and development, whether civilian or military, which seeks to apply knowledge of the chemical, electrical, sound vibration or other functioning of the human brain to the development of weapons which might enable any form of manipulation of human beings, including a ban on any actual or possible deployment (stressed by the author of the article) of such systems.” At the same time, the European countries resigned on this intention when accepting the NATO politics of non-lethal weapons. The same STOA report claims that the U.S. is a major promoter of the use of those arms and that: “In October 1999 NATO announced a new policy on non-lethal weapons and their place in allied arsenals ” In 1996 non-lethal tools identified by the U.S. Army included directed energy systems and radio frequency weapons.” Directed energy system is further defined by the STOA document: “Directed energy weapon system designed to match radio frequency source to interfere with human brain activity at synapse level.” Since 1999, those weapons have been upgraded for another 13 years.

In 1976, Zbygniew Brzezinski, the future National Security advisor to President Carter, wrote a book titled Between Two Ages, America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (Penguin Books, 1976, Massachusetts). In the book, he predicted a “more controlled and directed society” based on the development of technology, where an elite group will play a leading role, taking advantage of persisting social crises to use “the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.”

The use of mind control technologies was predicted as well in the 1994 publication of Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. The prediction for the year 2000 was the growth of terrorism, drug trafficking and criminality. This conclusion was drawn: “The president was thus amenable to the use of the sort of psychotechnology which formed the core of the RMA (revolution in military affairs) … it was necessary to rethink our ethical prohibitions on manipulating the minds of enemies (and potential enemies) both international and domestic … Through persistent efforts and very sophisticated domestic “consciousness raising,” old-fashioned notions of personal privacy and national sovereignty changed. As technology changed the way force was applied, things such as personal courage, face-to-face leadership, and the “war fighter” mentality became irrelevant.” Potential or possible supporters of the insurgency around the world were identified using the comprehensive Interagency Integrated Database. These were categorized as “potential” or “active,” with sophisticated personality simulations used to develop, tailor and focus psychological campaigns for each.” So, the Institute of Strategic Studies predicted that in the year 2000 those technologies would be so advanced that it would be possible to deprive a human being of his freedom and adjust his personality to the needs of ruling elite. Most probably those technologies were at this level already in 1994.

Attempts to make the general public acquainted with the existence of those weapons are, with respect to the fact that it is evident that democratic public would require an immediate ban of those technologies, systematically suppressed. Lopatin wrote: “The arms race is speeding up as a consequence of classification. Secrecy is the way to secure cruel control over the people, the way to curtail their creativity, turn them into biorobots.” Psychotronic war “is already taking place without declaration of war, secretly ” Only if the work on the mind control problem is no more covered by the screen of secrecy, extraordinariness, mysteriousness; if complex, open scientific research with international participation, is carried out, the psychotronic war including the use of psychotronic weapon can be prevented.”

The article, titled Informacni zbrane ohrozuji demokracii a lidstvo, was deleted from the website of the Czech internet newspaper Britske Listy ( www.blisty.cz ). The sharing of the original URL of the English version of the same article (Means of Information War Threaten Democracy and Mankind) is blocked on Facebook, and a similar article was deleted from the website of Australian magazine New Dawn. This proves that the governments keep open the option to use this technology against their uninformed citizens. This is as well confirmed by the fact that there exists no legislations punishing the use of those technologies by governments. Only in Russia and some of the states in the U.S. are there legislations punishing the ownership or trading with those technologies by nongovernmental entities. In the state of Michigan , for example, the sentence for this crime is equal to the sentence for ownership or trading with weapons of mass destruction.

Remote Control of the Brain and Human Nervous System

The USA and the European Union invest since the beginning of the millenium billions of dollars and euros into brain research. As a result of this research perfect maps of the brain were developed, including the areas of the brain that control the activity of different body organs or parts where higher brain activities, such as speech and thoughts, are taking place. The brain activities corresponding to different actions in those areas were also deciphered.

Thanks to the knowledge of specific locations of different centers in the brain and frequencies of the neuronal activity in them, teams of physicians are now capable of helping many people who were in the past, for different reasons, unable to participate in a normal life. There exist prostheses, which are controlled directly from the brain centers that normally control the movement of the limbs (see this) and enable people, who lost them, to use the prosthesis in a way similar to the way normal people use their limbs. Higher brain activities were produced as well. In 2006 scientists placed into the brain of a completely paralyzed man an implant, which transferred the activity of his brain into different devices and enabled him to open his e-mail, control his TV set and control his robotic arm. Other paralyzed people were able to search the Internet, play computer games and drive their electrical wheelchairs (see this).

Thanks to extensive brain research, computers were taught to understand the neuronal activity so much so that they are now capable of using the activity of our brain to reproduce our perceptions. Canadian scientists demonstrated an experiment, where the computer could interpret the electroencephalographical recordings from the brain to produce the painting of a face that the subject of experiment was perceiving (see this).

In the opposite way the data, processed by the computer in the way that will make them intelligible for the nervous system, can be transmitted into the brain and produce there a new reality. When an implant is placed in the brain and connected to a camera, placed on spectacles, for people whose photoreceptors in their retina stopped working, the sight is at least partially restored. In this case the camera on the spectacles is transmitting into the implant light frequencies and the implant re-transmits them in frequencies which “understand” the neurons processing the visual perceptions (see this).

In California scientists developed a device, which can register the brain waves and, using analysis, find among them consonants and vowels and in this way transform our thoughts to words. A paralyzed man could use this device to write without using a keyboard. Presently the accuracy of the device reaches 90%. Scientists believe that within five years they will manage to develop a smartphone, to which their device could be connected (see this).

Just like in the case of visual perception it is possible, when knowing the algorithms of brain processing of words, to generate algorithms of different words in the computer and transmit them into the brain in ultrasound frequencies and in this way produce in the human brain particular “thoughts”.

Everybody will easily fall victim to the proposal that, instead of typing or searching with the use of mouse, his computer or cell phone could react directly to his brain’s activity and take down his thoughts directly to the documents or carry out operations that has just occurred to him.

As a matter of fact Apple and Samsung companies have already developed prototypes of necessary electroencephalographical equipment, which can be placed on top of a head and transmit electromagnetic waves produced by the brain into the prototypes of new smart phones. The smart phones should analyze those waves, find out what are the intentions of their owners and carry them out. Apple and Samsung companies expect that the direct connection with brains will gradually replace computer keyboards, touch screens, mouse and voice orders (see this). When the system is complete, it will be feasible for hackers, government agencies and foreign government’s agencies to implant thoughts and emotions in people’s minds and “hearts“, when they will be connected to internet or cell phone systems.

In 2013 scientists in the USA could infer from the brain activity the political views of people and distinguish democrats from republicans and in 2016 scientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to make subjects of experiment more positive towards criticism to their country, than the participants whose brains were unaffected (see this).

Last year historian Juval Noah Harari was invited to deliver a speech at the World economic Forum in Davos. The editor of the British daily Financial Times stressed, when introducing him, that it is not usual to invite a historian to speak to most important world economists and politicians. Juval Noah Harari warned in his speech against the rise of new totality, based on the access to human brain. He said:

“Once we have algorithms that can understand you better than you understand yourself, they could predict my desires, manipulate my feelings and even make decisions on my behalf. And if we are not careful the outcome can be the rise of digital dictatorships. In the 21st century we may be enslaved under digital dictatorships”

In a similar way the Stanford University researcher in neurology and Dolby Labs’ chief scientist Poppy Crum warned at the conference in Las Vegas:

“Your devices will know more about you than you will. I believe we need to think about how [this data] could be used“.

In April 2017 neuroethicist at the University of Basel Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno, a human rights lawyer at the University of Zurich, writing in the journal Life Sciences, Society and Policy, published the article “Toward new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology“ where they called for the creation of legislation which would protect human right to freedom and other human rights from the abuse of technologies opening access to the human brain. In the article they wrote that “the mind is a kind of last refuge of personal freedom and self-determination” and “at present, no specific legal or technical safeguard protects brain data from being subject to the same data-mining and privacy intruding measures as other types of information“. Among the world media only the British newspaper The Guardian wrote about their proposal (see this). This fact suggests that in the actual democratic world there exists no political will to forbid remote control of human thoughts and feelings, no matter that such perspective breaks elementary principles of democracy.

In 2016 and 2017 10 European organizations tried to convince the European Parliament and the European Commission to enact the legislation that would ban the remote control of activity of the human nervous system, since pulsed microwaves could be used to manipulate the human nervous system at a distance at present time already (see this). Then in 2017, 19 world organizations addressed the G20 meeting with the same proposal. They received no positive response to their effort.

To achieve the ban of the use of remote mind control technologies it is necessary to work out an international agreement. In the past century the USA and Russia built systems (HAARP and Sura), capable to produce, by manipulation of the ionosphere, extra long electromagnetic waves in frequencies corresponding to frequencies of the activity of the human nervous system and in this way to control the brain activity of populations of vast areas of this planet (See this, “Psychoelectronic Threat to Democracy“). At the beginning of this year China announced the building of a similar, more advanced, system. The Chinese daily The South China Morning Post admitted in its article that the system could be used to control the activity of the human nervous system.

The politicians should, instead of classifying those weapons of mass destruction, make effort to create more democratic system of international politics to replace the current system of struggle for military power. Only in this way conditions could be provided for the ban of use of If this does not happen, in a few years there will be no chance to preserve democracy.

By Mojmir Babacek

Mojmir Babacek is the founder of the International Movement for the Ban of the Manipulation of the Human Nervous System by Technical Means, He is the author of numerous articles on the issue of mind manipulation.

And a interface based on this information for speaking with the assistant:
The Audeo is a sensor/device which detects activity in the larynx (aka. voice box) through EEG (Electroencephalography). The Audeo is unique in it’s use of EEG in that it is detecting & analyzing signals outside the brain on their path to the larynx.1 The neurological signals/data are then encrypted and then transmitted to a computer to be processed using their software (which can be seen being used in Kimberly Beals’ video).2 Once it is analyzed and processed the data can then be represented using a computer speech generator.

The results shed light on the distinct mechanisms associated with production of vowels and consonants, and could provide the basis for brain-based communication using imagined speech.https://books.google.se/books…

Soon afterwards, the serial entrepreneur created Neuralink, with the intention of connecting computers directly to human brains. He wants to do this using “neural lace” technology – implanting tiny electrodes into the brain for direct computing capabilities.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) aren’t a new idea. Various forms of BCI are already available, from ones that sit on top of your head and measure brain signals to devices that are implanted into your brain tissue.

They are mainly one-directional, with the most common uses enabling motor control and communication tools for people with brain injuries. In March, a man who was paralysed from below the neck moved his hand using the power of concentration.

Cognitive enhancement

A researcher uses a brain-computer interface helmet at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Grenoble. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Clatot/AFP/Getty Images

But Musk’s plans go beyond this: he wants to use BCIs in a bi-directional capacity, so that plugging in could make us smarter, improve our memory, help with decision-making and eventually provide an extension of the human mind.

“Musk’s goals of cognitive enhancement relate to healthy or able-bodied subjects, because he is afraid of AI and that computers will ultimately become more intelligent than the humans who made the computers,” explains BCI expert Professor Pedram Mohseni of Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, who sold the rights to the name Neuralink to Musk.

He wants to directly tap into the brain, effectively bypassing mechanisms such as speaking or texting. Musk has the credibility to talk about these things

Pedram Mohseni

“He wants to directly tap into the brain to read out thoughts, effectively bypassing low-bandwidth mechanisms such as speaking or texting to convey the thoughts. This is pie-in-the-sky stuff, but Musk has the credibility to talk about these things,” he adds.

Musk is not alone in believing that “neurotechnology” could be the next big thing. Silicon Valley is abuzz with similar projects. Bryan Johnson, for example, has also been testing “neural lace”. He founded Kernel, a startup to enhance human intelligence by developing brain implants linking people’s thoughts to computers.

In 2015, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that people will one day be able to share “full sensory and emotional experiences” online – not just photos and videos. Facebook has been hiring neuroscientists for an undisclosed project at its secretive hardware division, Building 8.

However, it is unlikely this technology will be available anytime soon, and some of the more ambitious projects may be unrealistic, according to Mohseni.

Pie-in-the-sky

A brain scan of a patient with Alzheimer’s. Photograph: BSIP/UIG via Getty Images

“In my opinion, we are at least 10 to 15 years away from the cognitive enhancement goals in healthy, able-bodied subjects. It certainly appears to be, from the more immediate goals of Neuralink, that the neurotechnology focus will continue to be on patients with various neurological injuries or diseases,” he says.

Mohseni says one of the best current examples of cognitive enhancement is the work of Professor Ted Berger, of the University of Southern California, who has been working on a memory prosthesis to replace the damaged parts of the hippocampus in patients who have lost their memory due to, for example, Alzheimer’s disease.

“In this case, a computer is to be implanted in the brain that acts similaly to the biological hippocampus from an input and output perspective,” he says. “Berger has results from both rodents and non-human primate models, as well as preliminary results in several human subjects.”

Mohseni adds: “The [US government’s] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) currently has a programme that aims to do cognitive enhancement in their soldiers – ie enhance learning of a wide range of cognitive skills, through various mechanisms of peripheral nerve stimulation that facilitate and encourage neural plasticity in the brain. This would be another example of cognitive enhancement in able-bodied subjects, but it is quite pie-in-the-sky, which is exactly how DARPA operates.”

Understanding the brain

In the UK, research is ongoing. Davide Valeriani, senior research officer at University of Essex’s BCI-NE Lab, is using an electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCI to tap into the unconscious minds of people as they make decisions.

BCIs could be a fundamental tool for going beyond human limits, hence improving everyone’s life

Davide Valeriani

“Everyone who makes decisions wears the EEG cap, which is part of a BCI, a tool to help measure EEG activity … it measures electrical activity to gather patterns associated with confident or non-confident decisions,” says Valeriani. “We train the BCI – the computer basically – by asking people to make decisions without knowing the answer and then tell the machine, ‘Look, in this case we know the decision made by the user is correct, so associate those patterns to confident decisions’ – as we know that confidence is related to probability of being correct. So during training the machine knows which answers were correct and which one were not. The user doesn’t know all the time.”

Valeriani adds: “I hope more resources will be put into supporting this very promising area of research. BCIs are not only an invaluable tool for people with disabilities, but they could be a fundamental tool for going beyond human limits, hence improving everyone’s life.”

He notes, however, that one of the biggest challenges with this technology is that first we need to better understand how the human brain works before deciding where and how to apply BCI. “This is why many agencies have been investing in basic neuroscience research – for example, the Brain initiative in the US and the Human Brain Project in the EU.”

Whenever there is talk of enhancing humans, moral questions remain – particularly around where the human ends and the machine begins. “In my opinion, one way to overcome these ethical concerns is to let humans decide whether they want to use a BCI to augment their capabilities,” Valeriani says.

“Neuroethicists are working to give advice to policymakers about what should be regulated. I am quite confident that, in the future, we will be more open to the possibility of using BCIs if such systems provide a clear and tangible advantage to our lives.”

Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces

Facebook is improving the 360 video experience by predicting where you will look

The plan is to eventually build non-implanted devices that can ship at scale. And to tamp down on the inevitable fear this research will inspire, Facebook tells me “This isn’t about decoding random thoughts. This is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.” Facebook likened it to how you take lots of photos but only share some of them. Even with its device, Facebook says you’ll be able to think freely but only turn some thoughts into text.

Skin-Hearing

Meanwhile, Building 8 is working on a way for humans to hear through their skin. It’s been building prototypes of hardware and software that let your skin mimic the cochlea in your ear that translates sound into specific frequencies for your brain. This technology could let deaf people essentially “hear” by bypassing their ears.

A team of Facebook engineers was shown experimenting with hearing through skin using a system of actuators tuned to 16 frequency bands. A test subject was able to develop a vocabulary of nine words they could hear through their skin.

To underscore the gravity of Building 8s mind-reading technology, Dugan started her talk by saying she’s never seen something as powerful as the smartphone “that didn’t have unintended consequences.” She mentioned that we’d all be better off if we looked up from our phones every so often. But at the same time, she believes technology can foster empathy, education and global community.

Building 8’s Big Reveal

Facebook hired Dugan last year to lead its secretive new Building 8 research lab. She had previously run Google’s Advanced Technology And Products division, and was formerly a head of DARPA.

Facebook built a special Area 404 wing of its Menlo Park headquarters with tons of mechanical engineering equipment to help Dugan’s team quickly prototype new hardware. In December, it signed rapid collaboration deals with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and more to get academia’s assistance.

Yet until now, nobody really knew what Building 8 was…building. Business Insider had reported on Building 8’s job listings and that it might show off news at F8.

According to these job listings, Facebook is looking for a Brain-Computer Interface Engineer “who will be responsible for working on a 2-year B8 project focused on developing advanced BCI technologies.” Responsibilities include “Application of machine learning methods, including encoding and decoding models, to neuroimaging and electrophysiological data.” It’s also looking for a Neural Imaging Engineer who will be “focused on developing novel non-invasive neuroimaging technologies” who will “Design and evaluate novel neural imaging methods based on optical, RF, ultrasound, or other entirely non-invasive approaches.”

Facebook has built hardware before to mixed success. It made an Android phone with HTC called the First to host its Facebook Home operating system. That flopped. Since then, Facebook proper has turned its attention away from consumer gadgetry and toward connectivity. It’s built the Terragraph Wi-Fi nodes, Project ARIES antenna, Aquila solar-powered drone and its own connectivity-beaming satellite from its internet access initiative — though that blew up on the launch pad when the SpaceX vehicle carrying it exploded.

But as Facebook grows, it has the resources and talent to try new approaches in hardware. With over 1.8 billion users connected to just its main Facebook app, the company has a massive funnel of potential guinea pigs for its experiments.

Today’s announcements are naturally unsettling. Hearing about a tiny startup developing these advanced technologies might have conjured images of governments or coporate conglomerates one day reading our mind to detect thought crime, like in 1984. Facebook’s scale makes that future feel more plausible, no matter how much Zuckerberg and Dugan try to position the company as benevolent and compassionate. The more Facebook can do to institute safe-guards, independent monitoring, and transparency around how brain-interface technology is built and tested, the more receptive it might find the public.

A week ago Facebook was being criticized as nothing but a Snapchat copycat that had stopped innovating. Today’s demos seemed design to dismantle that argument and keep top engineering talent knocking on its door.

“Do you want to work for the company who pioneered putting augmented reality dog ears on teens, or the one that pioneered typing with telepathy?” You don’t have to say anything. For Facebook, thinking might be enough.

The MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS!

There is no established legal protection for the human subject when researchers use Brain Machine Interface (cybernetic technology) to reverse engineer the human brain.

The progressing neuroscience using brain-machine-interface will enable those in power to push the human mind wide open for inspection.

There is call for alarm. What kind of privacy safeguard is needed, computers can read your thoughts!

In recent decades areas of research involving nanotechnology, information technology, biotechnology and neuroscience have emerged, resulting in, products and services.

We are facing an era of synthetic telepathy, with brain-computer-interface and communication technology based on thoughts, not speech.

An appropriate albeit alarming question is: “Do you accept being enmeshed in a computer network and turned into a multimedia module”? authorities will be able to collect information directly from your brain, without your consent.

This kind of research in bioelectronics has been progressing for half a century.

Brain Machine Interface (Cybernetic technology) can be used to read our minds and to manipulate our sensory perception!

So, you think you’ve seen it all? You haven’t seen anything yet. By the year 2030, advancements will excel anything we’ve seen before concerning human intelligence. In fact, predictions offer glimpses of something truly amazing – the development of a human hybrid, a mind that thinks in artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, spoke openly about this idea at the Exponential Finance Conference in New York. He predicts that humans will have hybrid brains able to connect to the cloud, just as with computers. In this cloud, there will be thousands of computers which will update human intelligence. The larger the cloud, the more complicated the thinking. This will all be connected using DNA strands called Nanobots. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie, doesn’t it?

Kurzweil says:

“Our hybrid thinking will be a combination of biological and non-biological thought processes.”

By the end of 2030, our thinking should be almost entirely non-biological and able to function much like an external hard drive – having the ability to backup information as with technology. It seems we keep pushing further the ability of the human mind.

Kurzweil believes one of the true characteristics of the being human is the ability to continually surpass knowledge.

Kurzweil wasn’t 100% accurate in his future predictions, but he was close enough. In 1990, he predicted several things for the year 2009, including portable computers and eyeglasses with the built-in computer screen. He didn’t, however, hit the nail on the head with self-driven cars. It was much later, this year, to be exact, that the idea touched the edge of mainstream technology. He was 86% accurate in his predictions, which is astonishing in itself.

Technological Takeover

No worries, there will probably not be a massive takeover by artificial intelligence. We have accounted for this long ago in other theories. For instance, fire provides a way to cook, but we have managed somehow to keep from burning everything down. The same rules apply here. We have taken the necessary precautions to safeguard ourselves from these horrors.

However, we must still play it safe. Kurzweil reminds us:

“Technology is a double-edged sword. It has its promise and its peril.”